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Earl Silbert, President of the College in 2000-2001, died peacefully, holding his daughter’s hand, listening to his favorite Gilbert and Sullivan song When I Was a Lad.
If you know the song, you know that Sir Joseph Porter begins it with “When I was a lad I served a term . . . As office boy to an Attorney’s firm.” Sir Joseph continues “As office boy I made such a mark . . . That they gave me the post of a junior clerk. . . . Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip . . . That they took me into the partnership.” And the refrain – “But that kind of ship so suited me .
. . That now I am the ruler of the Queen’s Navee!”
No deep secret why the song was Earl’s favorite. It tells the story, with a hefty helping of humor and self-deprecation, of the rise from junior clerk at a law firm to First Lord of Admiralty. Not much different than Earl’s own story.
Earl didn’t aspire to be a lawyer. He wanted to be a teacher. But after graduating from Harvard College in 1957 and a trip with friends that summer, he was too late to get a teaching job. He enrolled at Harvard Law School simply because he had no viable options. He still held out hope of becoming a teacher. After law school graduation, Earl took teaching courses at George Wash- ington University while slogging through his day job in the Tax Di- vision of the Justice Department. On weekends he and friends ran basketball and softball leagues for local underprivileged kids.
A friend suggested that Earl ap- ply for a job at the U.S. Attor- ney’s Office. He was hired and assigned to misdemeanor cases, which he describes as “the great- est experience one can ever have.” Maybe practicing law wasn’t such a bad career choice after all. Earl loved hearing people’s stories, helping those people. He especially loved it when he could help one of the kids he had man- aged in the youth sports leagues.
Earl served as an Assistant U.S. At- torney from 1964 to 1969; he re- turned to Justice to become the ar- chitect of the reform of the District of Columbia court system; and he returned to the U.S. Attorney’s Of- fice as Executive Assistant to imple- ment the reforms he had written.
In 1972, Earl was the First Assistant. At 6:30 a.m. on Saturday, June 17, Earl got a call from Chuck Work, a colleague in the office. “Earl, we have a hot one here.”
Hours earlier at the Watergate complex on the banks of the Potomac River, five men wearing business suits and surgical gloves had been arrested at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. One of them turned out to be James W. McCord Jr., a former CIA employee who was the head of security for the CRP, the Committee to Reelect the
President. After obtaining search warrants, two key co-conspirators were identi- fied, former White House aides G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.
Earl’s wife, Pat, had worked on the campaign of George S. McGovern, Nixon’s opponent in the 1972 election. Pat loathed Nixon and was convinced he was involved from the start.
Hunt and four of the burglars all pleaded guilty. Earl won convictions in January 1973 of McCord and Liddy. Meanwhile, Earl was investigating higher-ups. Amid mounting evidence of a coverup and growing impatience on Capitol Hill about the
speed and scope of the investigation, Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson appoint- ed special prosecutor Archibald Cox to assume authority for the Watergate investi- gation in May 1973. Cox was fired in the Saturday Night Massacre that October and was succeeded by Leon Jaworski, Past President of the College in 1961-1962. Jaworski would go on to secure convictions against former Attorney General John N.
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Pat frequently proclaimed Nixon guilty, and Earl’s stock response — “Show me the evidence” — infuriated her. Earl sympathized. “Sharing a home with one of the few people in the country who had inside information on the most-talked- about mystery of the day — and who revealed none of it — could only have been maddening.” So maddening that one night Pat became so frustrated by his reticence that she emptied a glass of port on Earl’s legal pad.